Why Are Communication Skills the Most Important Skills for Cyber Leaders?
Communication underpins all aspects of cybersecurity leadership: convincing business leaders that cyber resilience is critical to business success; influencing colleagues to engage with secure behaviours; or dealing with an incident effectively and efficiently. Sharpening cyber leaders communication tools underpin all other security activities – they are as important as the perimeter defences.
Not keeping ahead of an incident narrative – a recent example
In May 2024, the European Parliament quietly discovered that its “PEOPLE” recruitment platform had been rifled for months, leaking passports, criminal-record checks and marriage certificates for more than 8,000 employees. Technically, the fallout was ring-fenced to one HR database—serious, but containable. The crisis exploded because leadership stayed silent. Four weeks passed before the first all-staff email, which still dodged basic facts: how long the system had been open, whether files were copied, and what victims should do next. Staff met the news not with fear but anger; unions demanded answers, and privacy group NOYB filed complaints with the European Data Protection Supervisor. Headlines shifted from “IT glitch” to “Parliament hides breach,” raising questions about transparency at the heart of EU democracy. By July, the issue had migrated from tech pages to prime-time politics—proof that, in cybersecurity, the words you don’t say cost more than the data you lose.
Boards fund what they understand—and they understand what puts them personally on the line.
Modern directors sit under a spotlight that was once reserved for CISOs. Gartner’s widely-cited forecast that “75 % of CEOs will be personally liable for a serious cyber-physical incident by 2024” has migrated from conference clickbait to the risk registers of FTSE and DAX boards alike. Liability sharpens attention: when the same firewall mis-configuration can now trigger shareholder lawsuits, regulatory fines and, under the EU’s NIS2 regime, potential disqualification from management, directors suddenly demand cyber narratives in their own language - materiality, probability and financial exposure. Once that narrative is clear, the purse strings loosen.
The 2025 FAIR Institute “State of Cyber Risk Management” survey shows the pattern starkly: among organisations that quantify cyber risk in financial terms using FAIR, 65 % report “improved budget justification”, versus 58 % across the full sample—a 12 % lift in funding success attributable to clearer risk framing. In other words, when a CISO can say “a £2.4 million expected loss will fall to £600k if we invest £350k”, the proposal resonates with directors conditioned to think in ROI and enterprise value. Three mechanics explain the cause-and-effect:
- Cognitive accessibility – Money is the board’s native tongue; translating packet-level threats into EBITDA impact activates the same decision heuristics directors use for M&A or capex.
- Legal defensibility – A documented, quantified risk analysis demonstrates due care, creating an evidentiary shield if an incident triggers regulatory review or derivative claims.
- Competitive prioritisation – Cyber propositions compete with digital transformation, AI and ESG bids. Quantified stories let boards compare apples with apples and rank spend by value at risk reduced per pound invested.
Net result: Clarity converts to capital. Boards, now one breach away from personal jeopardy, will allocate funds to the programmes that let them sleep—and testify—with confidence. For cyber leaders, mastering the art of financial storytelling is therefore not cosmetic; it is the most direct route to sustained, adequately funded security posture.
Third-party risk and cyber insurance premiums are directly impacted by communication:
- Contractual precision. Precise security clauses eliminate ambiguity in supplier agreements, forcing vendors to meet verifiable baselines, shrinking the inherited attack surface and demonstrating proactive governance.
- Disciplined supplier onboarding. Comprehensive, plain-English due-diligence questionnaires exchanged before signature expose control gaps early; insurers view this mature intake process as evidence of robust third-party governance, typically offering premium reductions while enabling comparison across vendors.
- Codified breach-notification playbooks. Playbooks that stipulate names, timeframes and contact channels cut mean-time-to-intelligence when a supplier is hit, limiting downstream losses and reducing the probability of sub-limits being triggered, and satisfying regulatory timelines such as GDPR’s 72-hour rule.
- Transparent, continuous reporting. Ongoing, dashboard-driven performance reports such as quarterly SOC-2 attestations, vulnerability-remediation SLAs, phishing-simulation scores create a transparent risk ledger that can be assessed with confidence, often unlocking higher coverage limits or lower deductibles.
What can a cyber leader do today (and potentially everyday) to improve their communication skills?
What can a cyber leader do today (and potentially everyday) to improve their communication skills?
- Map your audiences and channels today. Catalogue every stakeholder group - from board to colleagues to third-party vendors - and match each to the medium they actually use, not the one you prefer.
- Master the financial dialect. Rehearse translating top cyber risks into expected loss, cash-flow impact and regulatory fines until it feels natural; this reframes “technical noise” as board-level decision data.
- Adopt the 90-second executive summary rule. Force yourself to brief senior leadership in under a minute and a half, then back-fill with detail only if asked.
- Run monthly micro-feedback loops. Pulse staff and peers with three quick questions on message clarity; close the loop publicly so people see their input shaping the narrative.
- Invest in narrative and crisis-comms training, not just technical CPD. Storytelling and media-handling courses deliver higher ROI on leadership credibility than another cert.
- Use a structured framing model (e.g., SBAR or FAIR) for every written update. Consistency breeds trust and slashes review time.
- Visualise risk, don’t verbalise it. Replace text-heavy decks with one-page heat maps or quant graphs; visuals compress complexity and stick in memory.
- Schedule cross-functional incident rehearsals that test messaging, not just playbooks. Debrief on clarity and speed of information flow, then adjust templates immediately.
Make a communications personal improvement plan – follow it every day. It only requires a little attention regularly to make a massive difference!
Superior communication is the single highest-ROI competency a cyber leader can cultivate, because every strategic objective—budget acquisition, incident containment, talent retention, regulatory compliance and cultural transformation—ultimately depends on the precision, clarity and cadence of the narrative they deliver. As attack surfaces sprawl and disclosure regimes tighten, technical brilliance without persuasive articulation becomes operational debt. By translating packet-level complexity into board-level risk, mobilising cross-functional response and sustaining behavioural change, the communicator-in-chief converts knowledge into measurable enterprise resilience and long-term shareholder value.